L*st and Death

For most people, shame served as a catalyst for guilt or anger—but Baekgyeong was different. He was someone fundamentally lacking in shame, and guilt, to him, was a feeling as distant as the stars were from one another. Emotionally flatlined, Baekgyeong always chose the simplest route: anger.

Maybe that’s why. No matter how many times he experienced it, facing shame never felt familiar.

— Lowercase card —

PS. Isn’t it impressive? After everything you’ve wrecked, you’re still alive.

Sitting in the guest room of the Scarsdale mansion, Baekgyeong studied the puzzle his mother had left behind. This one was relatively easy compared to the others. As he jotted the answer down with a pen, he muttered to himself:

“DeLorean DMC-12. So the answer is... ‘d.’”

The DeLorean DMC-12 was the time-traveling car from the Back to the Future series. The DeLorean had been sold as a real drivable vehicle, and Baekgyeong’s father had customized a 1982 model from the 1981–83 production run as a 10th wedding anniversary gift for his wife—because she had been a huge fan of the film series and of Michael J. Fox.

Around the age of fourteen, Baekgyeong had taken that treasured DeLorean—carefully maintained in the garage—and joyrode it down the road. He had no driving experience; all he knew came from watching the chauffeur from the backseat. Inevitably, he crashed it straight into a roadside tree and was rushed to the hospital. The car was beyond repair, declared a total loss.

Furious, Choi Baekhee tried to force Baekgyeong into undergoing brain surgery—but she eventually relented in the face of his desperate, hysterical resistance.

From the start of his adolescence, Baekgyeong and his parents had fought over one single issue: the tumor. His parents urged him to have it removed before it grew worse; Baekgyeong, for his part, was willing to die before he let anyone operate on him. Their arguments had become all-out war.

“Either get the surgery and end up a cripple, or get the surgery and die—just pick one already! Please!”

To Baekgyeong, the times he’d hurt others were just that—incidents from the past that had no bearing on the present. He had completely forgotten about that day until reading his mother’s message. He’d simply assumed she was cold-hearted. He hadn’t realized just how much harm he’d done—or perhaps he had, but had kept it buried below the surface.

“Fucking hell. I really did it all.”

Looking back on his younger self with a grimace, Baekgyeong scribbled the answers so far on a blank sheet of paper.

k, h, f, d

For now, they formed no recognizable word. He had no idea what order they were meant to go in, either. Feeling stuck, Baekgyeong let out a deep sigh. Then he thought of Siron and grabbed his phone. As expected, Siron hadn’t replied since his message about being sorry he couldn’t attend the funeral.

What the hell is he doing that he barely even checks in?

Just as Baekgyeong was about to call him, a new alert popped up at the top of the screen. An email from Park Daniel.

Subject: Diggy hyung, it’s Danieol;;

Body:

Wow, can’t believe we got the backdoor into the company server without getting caught. Fucking insane lol.

Bet you were sweating bullets, huh? lmao.

But seriously, your company’s security is way too sloppy;;; Can a major corporation really be this bad lol.

Anyway, someone else planted a backdoor before us. It’s self-programmed to erase its traces after a set time, so we have no idea when it was installed, or if it came from inside or outside.

Vile Group’s servers are set to block foreign IPs, so whoever accessed it did so from within the U.S.—but they used traffic redirection, so the access address changed every time. If this is urgent, it’d be faster to report it as a company-level hack and track them through that. Of course, in the process they’ll probably find the backdoor we installed too... but you won’t get in trouble. You’re you.

One thing I want to ask though—I'm helping you without question, but who are these people you're looking for? If this has to do with Ms. Choi, shouldn’t you report it to the police?

Frustration tightened in Baekgyeong’s chest. He’d thought all he needed to do was get the backdoor planted—Daniel would do the rest. But that wasn’t the case. All he’d confirmed was that the other party had thoroughly played Vile Group for fools.

Worse, during the process of hacking the emails exchanged with his mother, Daniel’s address had been exposed. It was just an email address, but they couldn’t risk it. Now they had no choice but to scrap the old server and build a private one from scratch.

Baekgyeong left a reply for Daniel, asking him to update him if anything new came up. Then he opened the tracking app and checked Siron’s location. Thankfully, user noname1, Siron, was currently at Anna’s house.

Zooming in on the map, Baekgyeong examined the location closely. The red dot marked Siron’s position clearly within the margin of ten meters. Just knowing where he was brought Baekgyeong a small sense of relief, softening his tense expression.

Then came a knock at the door.

Without even looking up from his phone, Baekgyeong called out for them to come in. The door swung open—but no one stepped inside for several long seconds. Only then did he realize his father, red-faced from alcohol, was standing in the doorway. It wasn’t even past 8PM, and the man was already wearing silk pajamas and a work robe. The same hand that had once clutched paintbrushes now gripped a bottle of wine.

“You’re here?”

Baek Kwonil didn’t answer. He staggered into the room, passed Baekgyeong by, and collapsed into the single-person wing chair. He looked like a defeated old man—someone who had wandered around offering unsolicited advice no one listened to, and had ended up treated like a ghost.

“Sang’s got a company emergency. He’s flying back to Korea on the morning commercial flight.”

“So tonight, the private jet’s just for the two of us?”

“No. I’m flying out with Sang tomorrow morning too.”

“You’ve got business in Korea too?”

“No. Ten years unemployed. You think I have business?”

In other words, he didn’t want to be on the same plane as Baekgyeong. He’d rather fly out with his older son. That was fine with Baekgyeong. He had been dreading the long flight alone with a father who clearly wanted nothing to do with him.

“What were you doing?”

“Solving a puzzle.”

“Weren’t you supposed to solve it with your brother?”

“I was gonna cheat—figure it out first and act all smart later.”

Baek Kwonil let out a snort, amused despite himself. He flipped through the cards Baekgyeong had been solving. His eyes lingered longest on the one about the DeLorean. A deep laugh burst from him, the kind people make when they’ve heard a genuinely funny joke. He must’ve read the line: I still think your dad looked a lot like the movie’s protagonist.

Though already fairly drunk, he kept sipping from the bottle and rereading the cryptic notes Baekgyeong’s mother had left.

“You were a real bastard.”

Baekgyeong had already spent the day being shocked anew by his own past. He’d been a teenager worthy of being strangled. So he agreed without hesitation.

“Seems like it.”

“I still haven’t forgiven you. You’ve never given me a proper apology.”

There was only one event that Baek Kwonil had never forgiven. At the time, he had been preparing for his first comeback exhibition in ten years. The paintings had taken years of effort. But two weeks before the show, it was abruptly canceled—because Baekgyeong had slashed and destroyed more than half of the works intended for display, rendering the entire exhibition impossible.

The exhibition had been hyped as one of the most important art events of the year. So when it was canceled, his humiliation became very public.

Baek Kwonil was a painter who fused surrealism and realism. He filled massive canvases with hyper-detailed brushwork, building up thick layers of oil paint. Each painting took an enormous amount of time to complete.

When those painstaking works were ruined, he spiraled into a brutal slump. Eventually, he became incapable of painting altogether. He stopped going to his studio. All he did was drink.

Seeing this, Baekgyeong’s mother had resolved to pull her husband out of his depression—and decided to remove Baekgyeong from the house.

After that, Baekgyeong was sent far from New York, to Holmby Hills in California. He lived in a massive mansion, surrounded by hired staff and occasionally visited by a distant cousin. He drifted through indulgent days, sustaining shallow connections with strangers who came for parties. And then one day, like a petty thief, a soaking-wet Siron had wandered into someone else’s room and passed out there. That was when they met.

“I couldn’t overcome you. But your mom tried. She really did.”

Thinking of his endless list of fucked-up behavior, Baekgyeong replied:

“She did, yeah.”

His father hesitated for a moment before speaking again.

“AmazeChew.”

“...What?”

“The simplest way to build patience. The answer to the one you couldn’t figure out.”

“...Bubble gum? The answer was bubble gum?”

“Close enough.”

His father gazed at him, as if hoping the word would spark something in Baekgyeong’s mind. But even after hearing the answer, he felt no memories surface.

With sunken eyes, Baek Kwonil stared at his son, then asked flatly:

“Don’t you miss your mom?”

“To be honest, not really.”

A faint flicker of shock passed across his father’s face. Baekgyeong continued:

“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t feel longing, or sadness—but I feel disgusting. ...I’ve been questioning this shitty feeling nonstop.”

It was probably because Baekgyeong was deeply involved in his mother’s death. If his brain hadn’t been broken, Choi Baekhee never would’ve had reason to get involved in genetics in the first place.

Solving his mother’s riddles, Baekgyeong began to realize just how long he had been hurting other people. He had lived his whole life as an aggressor—tireless, persistent, malicious. It wasn’t just his family. Yoon Siron, too, had accepted Baekgyeong only because he had no other choice.

But his father seemed to take Baekgyeong’s answer as a kind of grief—a single, squeezed-out drop from a broken brain. His expression softened, as if he’d finally gotten the answer he was hoping for.

“It’s because you lost her so suddenly. You’re angry, bitter. Baekhee... your mom was probably even more bitter.”

He awkwardly placed a hand on Baekgyeong’s shoulder, patted it once, and turned away, his face folding in on itself to swallow his grief.

And Baekgyeong just stood there, nailed to the floor, long after he was gone.

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